As technologists, half the technology we need to know for our jobs is getting invented or reinvented on a daily basis. You already know this: look at the rapid onset of Docker; look to the continual improvement of languages like Java and Go; look to the features and services that public clouds introduce daily. Mastering […]

by Jess Males | Technical Consultant at Taos Operating our infrastructure as code delivers a world of best practices from the realm of software development. Linting before commits is a no-brainer. Continuous delivery relieves the drudgery of manually rolling out infrastructure changes. These practices are now common. One practice less frequently discussed is test-driven-development: write […]

by Jess Males | Technical Consultant at Taos Greybeard Sysadmin If we give the developers root access, we’re headed for a disaster of biblical proportions. Director of IT What do you mean, “biblical”? Greybeard Sysadmin Old Testament, real wrath of God type stuff: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies; human sacrifice; dogs and […]

by Jess Males | Technical Consultant at Taos Arguably, the golden age of car design was the 1950s and 1960s. Tail-finned automobiles were cast as rocket-ships, blasting us boldly into the future. And this was fine, as long as that future had no unforeseen, unplanned incidents. “Unsafe at Any Speed” by Ralph Nader painted the […]

by Jess Males | Technical Consultant at Taos Json has become a lingua franca. The modern world of api-driven, -as-a-Service platforms put json front and center, using it as a default structure for passing around large data objects. If, like me, you live in unix-land full-time, you may have been able to ignore it. The […]

by Jess Males | Technical Consultant at Taos There’s a long list of technologies operations staff have to know. Networking, storage, web-servers, email, DNS, kernels, monitoring: this list is far from complete. This is a formidable list, and enough to keep anyone busy, but, let’s take a moment to look in some other corners; there, […]

by Jess Males | Technical Consultant at Taos I’m young enough that I missed the editor wars. I’ve heard the tale of the righteous crusades where mobs rallied around banners of Emacs or Vi and set aflame large swaths of Usenet. Assuming they weren’t just curmudgeons fighting for irascibility’s sake alone; why would anyone get […]

by Jess Males | Technical Consultant at Taos I had the opportunity, recently, to attend AutomaCon, an exciting new conference dedicated to all things automation. It was three days of sharing and discussion around systems automation. Attending, one question that floated in the back of my mind was: what is DevOps? I don’t subscribe to […]

There’s a spirit of adventure at conferences. It’s putting on a pith helmet and encountering big, hairy beasts as strange, new industry problems are described. It’s foraging deep into the jungle of new ideas and bringing back delicious, new fruits. It’s discovering new friends and allies, similarly interested in mapping the trails.

Seattle hosts Cascadia IT Conference, and poetry aside, my experience there was fruitful. It’s a journey I’ve made twice now, and each has been rewarding. This year the big idea I bagged was offered up by Paul English: Test Driven Systems Administration.